Anna's birthday

Anna shared her birthday celebration with her cousin whose Birthday is a week earlier, and I'm embarrassed to admit I don't have a single picture of Elena and her pie or presents. I was selfishly engrossed with my baby.
Anna usually goes to bed between 5:30 and 6:00pm so I wasn't sure how the "late" evening would go (she gets up, wide awake and yelling at us, between 5:oo and 5:30am, sick, I know, we've tried everything, yes, the obvious later bedtime and not going to her until 6:00am, but she has a very strong will and she's broken me).

But, I under-estimated her extroverted personality and she thrived on the attention. You can see in the cake pictures she's beginning to fade, but then she got her second wind with the presents and was glowing by the end of the night.Anna's Godmama made her a banana pie because as much, as I fought it, Anna has become Anna banana or, just "the banana". It's ironic because she hates bananas. She has banana radar and if you offer banana on a spoon, no matter how disguised it is, she'll reject it every time until you remove the offending banana piece. I thought every baby loved bananas.
So, she may not have eaten any of the bananas, but she really dug the vanilla pudding on top.
And Elena's blueberry pie.
Grandma put together this "church box" for her. It has some neat treasures that she loves taking in and out of the box. She really likes the necklaces. She's such a girl in that she loves "dressing up." Her favorite is the Theotokos/Jesus icon. She sits in church opening and closing it. (I'm missing a couple items in the picture below).
This one was the the most fun to watch her open an when it was pulled out of the box she knew exactly what to do with it. Her Godpapa made it for her and she knows it's hers. It's in our living room right now and if Joachim touches it she shrieks at him (which makes him do it more and thus goes my induction into sibling rivalry).
Anna "dressed up" in the ribbons and necklace she put on all by herself.